Question Is theft of translations a problem for translators?

Recently on several novels I see a recurring line. This was translated by XXX site if you are reading anywhere else it's a theft of translated property. Please support the original translators.

So this got me wondering is this a problem? And if so why? As how are these people getting more readers as both sites offer it for free. And most people get their translation updates from my(I think).

Any answers?

 

The reason it is a problem is most site use ads for a bit of income, so the original who did the work should be the one getting the benifits. The reason why is because it is very easy to do, just copy and paste then format for your own website now you make money on ads for doing no work.

 

As a translator.... well, I guess it is a problem. Especially when the site life depends on the views it gets.

 

Seems to me that you want to start a pirate site .
As a fellow brother in crime, yes it's very lucrative. Do it.
Seriously, it's a dumb question, is stealing your phone and renting it out for money a crime?
If you really want to start a pirate site go ahead.
I bet you will get more views than most sites, many readers love pirates since at least pirate sites did not lie to them and steal wuxiaworld translations...oh wait...
Stupidity at its finest .

In summary, the existence of pirate sites is not the problem. Readers patronizing them is the problem.
And anyone who says that it is fine because they use ad blocker is pretty ignorant, they will still increase the search ranking of the pirate site.
I recently searched for a novel and pirate sites were number 1 to 5 or even more in the search results...madness!

 

Imagine you made a sandwich. Then some asshat takes your sandwich and eats it. How would you feel?

 

If someone completely copying it from that translator site (aka plagiarizing), post and claiming that he's the translator, that's a thief indeed.

But, if someone happen to be translating the same novel with that translator, and both of them didn't get an official permission to translate it from the author, he's not a theft but both of them had some serious problem there

 

Yes stealing from a thief makes you innocence.. in Lala yeah right

 

Yes, a pretty big one in fact.

Loss of views/revenue for translators that monetize. Loss of control over the translations for groups that do not, or groups that are legal but bound by non-proliferation terms.

For the same reasons manga is consumed mostly through aggregators now. All the content in one place and it ranks above scanlator sites in search. A small translation group that runs a basic Wordpress blog will not have the know-how or resources to do a good SEO. Google tends to be the second biggest source of traffic after Novel Updates and it's very easy for a typical group to get buried on 3rd/4th page of search results behind aggregators. Majority of traffic goes to the top search results, like everywhere else.

 

Because we did so much effort in translating, then bam. The aggregator sites has more views than in our translation site.

 

Honestly pirates are a problem, but all I can say is unless your a translator it won't really affect you UNTIL if it gets bad to the point a translator drops the novel your reading then you can only curse the gods, or MTL your choice

 

In summary readers support the middle man and kill the content creators.
Human stupidity at its finest yet again, doing the one thing that will stop them from getting what they want...unbelievable

 

Oui

 

Yes it is

 

A lot of people are too short sighted which in turn hurts their long term goal (of reading). A lot of people don't care and have the mentality that "meh, someone else will pick it up in a day or so".

Sure money is important but no one seems to have pointed out the reason of validation and appreciation.
If no one comes to their site and expresses joy and gratitude some of the people involved in the translation may not have motivation enough to continue.

 

To be more accurate, in this case you're making the sandwiches with money from your own pocket, while some asshat keeps stealing them and selling as his own.

 

Most of the translators that put that there, are doing it for aggregator sites. Situations where ABC is translating a novel, and then XYZ comes along with their own website and steals ABC's translation are pretty rare.

This entire thing is basically a copy of what happened with manga translations and their conflict with aggregators.

Most translators are getting some ad revenue, but while i don't have any numbers, i am pretty confident the dollars earned are shockingly low. Almost everyone has ad blockers, and even when they don't, ad revenue is much smaller than you'd think. We're talking maybe the difference of a few cents a day for a total of maybe 1-3 dollars a month.

There's donations and patreon, but anyone who goes to an aggregator site to read content, is the kind of person who wont donate regardless, so there's no direct loss there.

The real issue is recognition and respect, or we could just say page views.

If you're reading it on some other site, the translator isn't getting their page views, they aren't getting recognized, and they aren't getting respect.

As an author and a person with a youtube channel, i can tell you from personal experience, that seeing view numbers going up is a fantastic feeling, but they are, if i am not being emotional, utterly worthless at the same time. How many people view my video makes no difference outside of the ad revenue that it brings in, and that number is incredibly low. I'm not making a living off of my content creation, I'm not even coming close. If my numbers drop by half, or by two thirds, or by three quarters, or by 99%, it makes no real difference.

It makes me sad, however.

And that's what we're mostly talking about here, the fact that it triggers a purely emotional sensation in the content creators. They get upset due to not being respected, and to be clear, they are not being respected, and then they translate less, or implement various other methods, such as password walls, or posting google translated jibberish to "punish" the aggregator sites.

 

I completely agree with this.
For me, it's more about the actual readers.
Because you can already see those reoccurring lines even show in the pirate sites.
And I've also seen readers who comment stuffs like
"I've read this before from (insert a pirate site here) & saw the (reoccurring lines here) so I went and search for your original page blah blah blah"
Just from that you can already see that readers already know that the novel they're reading was stolen but they still insist on patronizing those pirated sites for I don't know reason
But maybe for convenience?
I've seen a Lot of readers complain on how they're having troubles accessing the translators works because of passwords & what not (& yes they complain even if the passwords are right in front of their faces. I don't know how they misses tbh) & I guess this ia one of the reasons why they switch to pirates sites where they doesn't need to bother.
Other than that. It's probably just flat out laziness, cuz they can leisurely read them at the pirated sites, why would they bother to switch up

 

unbelievable

 

Bummer! I tried everything to incite pirate site supporters. I remember someone recently saying that he will turn off ad blocker if he feels the site deserves it since its his payment.
What an idiot!
I was hoping people like him will respond here.
A lot of ignorant people should try hiring translators, then they can argue if ad revenue can cover the wages.
I have said it a dozen times, ads are donations nothing more.
Even volunteers get a free meal.
If you think a worker does not deserve compensation then you support slavery and are a fool.
And don't use Google as an example of free works, they have gotten sued a lot as they are the biggest pirates I earth.
Sadly, business models like Huffington Post that doesn't pay a majority of their contributors thrive in such an environment.
I will never use volunteers in my website moving forward. . It is abuse. It makes my skin crawl

 

Well imagine you have this novel you really like. It is quite literally your favourite novel. One day you go to check on it and realize there's no chapter. Eventually you look it up and you find another website with the same chapter you last read only to find that the TR quit because of lack of views and motivation. This surprised you because there was a lot of viewers last you checked. However these were seen from a pirate site and the TR doesn't know that his novels so popular now not only has the TR quit on your favourite novel but so has the pirate site because they haven't really been translating it at all.

That's at least how I see it. Correct me if I'm wrong. Also novelupdates doesn't lead to any pirate sites. do they?